


The Sleek Allure of a Grand You Can’t Ignore

by gooddadstan



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Red Robin (Comics), Robin (Comics)
Genre: Music, Tim plays the piano and you can pry that from my cold dead hands, Tim’s relationship with his parents is uh... interesting, no editing we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-10 19:21:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20856935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooddadstan/pseuds/gooddadstan
Summary: Tim Drake learned the piano as a child, and never really forgot about it, despite dropping out of practice as the years go on.





	The Sleek Allure of a Grand You Can’t Ignore

Tim Drake learned early on that his parents hated the silence. They’d do almost anything to fill it, from playing their regal classical music they sat and read to, to swing music his mother would sometimes laugh and dance with his father to, all through the genres with only the exclusion of the more ‘teenager sounds’, that his mother insisted wasn’t even music. When there wasn’t any music, there was the hum of voices and sound effects from the television, or the harsh yells from his parents fighting again.

Music seemed to be the only thing keeping his parents from turning their tight and fake ‘public voices’ to the angry roars they only had alone in the house. Music meant that the night was safe from their rage.

So Tim was almost overjoyed when one day his parents came home with movers behind them, bringing a grand piano through the door as carefully as they could. His mother had sat on the sofa, motioned for Tim to sit next to her, and told him that he would take lessons for the piano and learn to play like the recordings they had heard time and time again. His heart leapt, resolute to stave off the rage that filled the silence but intimidated by the massive responsibility it seemed to bring with it. To be the only thing between his parents and their fights, to have his fingers on the keys as the final barrier from another night of hiding in his room with his stuffed lion clung tight in his arms.

His lessons started after his parents had left again, two days of silence filled with music and one day of silence filled with shouts fading into long days of silence with nothing but small feet to break it. He liked being able to fill his own personal silence, though it was clunky at first. He liked having something to distract from the empty house, the nanny only coming three times a week at this point (Once to bring him to his lesson, once to check the groceries, and once to clean).

The grand piano in the sitting room became his home, from when he had to lug the pedal extensions his teacher lent him back and forth from lessons to when pushing the cold metal under his feet felt more natural than walking.

When the last nanny was fired, though, his lessons stopped. The teacher was too far away and couldn’t do home visits, so his parents stopped paying for him to learn. They still asked him to play for them when they were home, as they had since about a year and a half into his lessons for them to use as background noise without standing to change the songs, but the disappointment at the slower rate Tim picked up new songs was more than visible.

It was only when Tim became Robin that he really stopped playing the piano. There was no time, between his schoolwork and training to be with Batman on the streets to drag him out of that rut that had criminals in full-body casts since the last Robin’s death. So he stopped playing, until his father returned to Gotham in a coma and his mother was dead.

When he heard of his mother’s death, his eyes lingered on the black grand longer than it had in months. The lid closed on the keys, the lid shut softly from when the maid who now came to clean the house again had closed it and Tim had never opened again. The maid who would no longer come to clean the house without anyone to pay her. Tim’s soft footsteps on the worn wood around the piano, louder than he remembered them, brought him to lightly run his hand along the side of the instrument. The silence had returned, with none but Tim to break it once more.

Lifting the lid was easier than he remembered, the lid prop rising gently with his hand as it settles into place like it did every time. He strode to the bench with a vigor he hadn’t held in this house since his first night as Robin, too awake to sleep and too tired to do anything but go into his room and collapse onto his bed. The fall board, too, was light under his calloused fingers, as the empty music rack stared at him, daring him to play from memory.

So play from memory he did, hands poised above the keys for less than a second before he launched into a song. His mother had called it his favorite, before she died. Chopin’s Etüde Op.25 No.1, also called ‘Aeolian Harp’. It had been hard for Tim to pick up, to say the least, a bit more than two months spent practicing it before he felt ready to show his parents. But the true, genuine smile on his mother’s face when he finished and looked at them, the lack of novelty in the situation keeping his internal grin off his face until he saw their expressions, it was worth it. So every time she asked, every time she seemed to be slightly more annoyed than was preferred, Aeolian Harp would ring through the halls with the same feeling it held when the Drake’s first heard it from under their son’s fingertips.

Years later, Tim wasn’t sure if his mother truly deserved how much he poured his soul into that piece. Wasn’t sure if the hours he spent burning it into his mind just for a smile on his mother’s face was the amount of effort he should have had to put into the pursuit of motherly affections. But still, the song danced through his head, one of the few songs he never seemed to get tired of letting play over and over in his mind as a personal performance. He hadn’t played the piano in… too long, not since his father died at the hands of Captain Boomerang and wasn’t there to ask him to play anymore. The manor had their own full grand, the lid eternally propped and sitting in wait for someone to tickle the ivories. No one did, not in the years of his life Tim had spent there.

But every so often his fingers would twitch for it, darting along a surface unconsciously in the controlled movements of one of the songs he still had memorized after all this time. Alfred noticed, he was sure, but the butler never commented on it so his skill remained hidden from the bats and birds that made up his new pseudo-family. He could settle for that, listen to their sound and jokes and laughter. It was never silent anymore, in the manor, so he didn’t need to play.

Until, Tim looked back, the silence managed to follow him. From the Drake household to the manor when he was Robin, to his time with the Titans and his own apartment, back into the manor where things had been blissfully, kindly, loud since his return from his solitude. Where Tim Drake goes, silence seems to follow. So one day, an afternoon where he knew Jason and Dick were arguing on the other side of the manor, where Damian was off doing whatever he does with Titus in his trail, Bruce was being Bruce in his study, and Alfred was busying himself with housework, Tim found himself in the same room as the grand so alike the one still sitting in the room on the Drake’s land. The keys exposed to the world, the tablet in Tim’s hand is quickly forgotten on one of the end tables as he approaches the bench.

He’s not quite sure when he sits, just that being at a piano like he is reminds him of every time he turned to look for his parents approval, every time he would stop at a wrong note and play the section over and over again until he couldn’t get it wrong. Every hour of every day he spent pouring his soul into the music sits behind his eyes as his hands stand poised above the keys from muscle memory.

_He didn’t need to do all he did for his parents approval back then,_ he swears to himself in his mind, as his fingers fall into the starting notes of the last song he played for his father, his mother’s favorite, as he watched the man’s expression shift between love and sadness with every measure. _He didn’t need to take such responsibility into his music,_ his fingers dance across the keys in notes he’s not sure he could ever get wrong at this point. _But he still loved those keys with all his heart, for every note played wrong or right and every chord striking his heart._ The rise and fall of every measure flows into his body, swaying slightly side to side as his hands fly. _Even now, the music was a haven for him, a way to be free of the silence that followed him._ The pedals eased silently under his foot, holding onto the notes before letting them go, measure after measure, phrase after phrase. _Even through the pressure he placed on it, on himself, the music embraced Tim and held him close._ The pressure on the keys growing with every crescendo and falling all the same, weaving a web of feeling as intricately as it could. _And Tim, too, embraced it back._

The low trill of the piece went seamlessly into the final chords, and as Tim’s hands froze above the keys for just a second, a loud applause makes him frantically turn in his seat.

Dick, with the rest of the birds and bats there with him, clapped obnoxiously despite the awed silence from the others in the room. When he settled his hands back to his sides, the chorus of compliments rose to fill the silence, more genuine and excited than his parents had been in the years he’d purposely put on a show for them. They encouraged him to play for them, assorted grins ranging from Dick’s face almost splitting in two to Damian’s barely an upturned corner that was somehow still more rewarding than Janet’s tight smile he got most nights.

His parents weren’t worth the amount of effort he put into making music for them, he realized. But maybe? Maybe this family was.


End file.
